(With Infographic) WooCommerce 2.3 “The Handsome Hippo” Has Arrived

It has been a while since the previous WooCommerce 2.2 “Prowling Pangolin” released in last September. While you’re busy with holiday seasons, WooThemes team has worked restlessly to bring the “Handsome Hippo” WooCommerce 2.3 to life.

The major changes in this WooCommerce 2.3 version focus on a more eye-pleasing and easier user interface (well, it’s about a “handsome” version after all).

Now, let’s go through the major new features in this version with our infographic as well as feature list below. A big fat THANK to all the contributors at WooThemes who dedicated their effort into making eCommerce shop owner’s life easier with WooCommerce!

WooCommerce 2.3 Notable Changes

Image’s credit: WooThemes

Refined frontend and backend user interface

From its beta release, the main changes in user interface have been addressed both in front end and backend. According to James Koster, WooCommerce 2.3 has a flat design look to make it go well with the current theme design trend. The changes in frontend lie in style editing, the movement of some buttons to separate plugins,… – check the detailed list here.

WooCommerce usage tracking

WooThemes has added a brand new usage tracking feature to help them gather data about the performance of WooCommerce installed in WordPress sites to improve it further.

The data to be collected are all non-sensitive (except for admin email in case they want to contact you to inform about the potential vulnerability or updates). You can check the list of things will be tracked here.

Of course if you don’t want to enable this tracking feature, you’re free to turn it off in WooCommerce’s control panel.

There are many things developers should update too

Firstly is the coupon changes – theme and plugin developers will need to check out their files so when running with WooCommerce 2.3, there will be no deprecated notice or problem with after-tax discounts.

Besides, there are UI for webhooks, geo-location feature, unit testing and more which really need developer’s attention. Check out this note for details of things you should double check.